If it really is fully autonomous, that first video is insane. I struggle to put those little tags into the slot in the box sometimes, and I'm pretty sure I'm human, but the bot gets it on the first attempt.

I’m curious how they prompt the model or otherwise tell it what its goal is. They seem to suggest some language processing — perhaps they’re starting with a multimodal text + vision LLM?

Kinda genius to scale exoskeleton data collection with UMI grippers when most labs are chasing "general" VLMs / VLAs by training on human demonstration videos.

Imo the latter will be very useful for semantic planning and reasoning, but only after manipulation is solved.

A ballpark cost estimate -

- $10 to $20 hourly wages for the data collectors

- $100,000 to $200,000 per day for 10,000 hours of data

- ~1,500 to 2,500 data collectors doing 4 to 6 hours daily

- $750K to $1.25M on hardware costs at $500 per gripper

Fully loaded cost between $4M to $8M for 270,000 hours of data.

Not bad considering the alternatives.

For example, teleoperation is way less efficient - it's 5x-6x slower than human demos, and 2x-3x more expensive per hour of operator time. But could become feasible after low-level and mid-level manipulation and task planning is solved.